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Aggregating Steve

I am working on an application to become friends with Steve Moraco, official friends, that is. If you don’t know Steve, just think of a Steve Gates or a Bill Jobs, i.e. a 20-something concatenation of those two pioneers of Computer Revolution 1.0. I think he knows more about the fine arts than Bill Gates back in the day and enjoys a more stable personality than Steve Jobs.

Anyhow a month or so back, Steve gave me his perspective on how to get a job: “Be legitimately helpful to their business before they have to choose whom to hire.” Well, this advice entails knowing the business of the person for whom you wish to work. In the case of friendship, it means getting to know what is important to the other person, what they believe, their priorities, etc.

So I began studying Steve’s website and blog. This pursuit made me really wish I had an aggregator app. What I mean is something like on Bible Gateway but with a client-side indexing function. On Bible Gateway I can highlight any passage of scripture and add a note and then find those the next time I visit that particular page of the Bible. What Bible Gateway does not do, however, as far as I know, is push the passage and/or note automatically to a document (not just to a cookie) on my computer. Here is how that would look in the case of a Steve Moraco index:

The one thing that the most successful and prolific creative people in our world (Turing, Tesla, Ai Wei Wei, Grace Hopper, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.) have in common is that they were willing to work to understand technical details of entire fields of expertise that appeared to have nothing to do with their work. Once they had a good grasp of the first principles and best practices in a diverse range of fields they were able to apply all of those insights to their work in a single industry or pursuit. That is what makes their work outstanding and relevant. (Moraco, S. (2015, February 13). What School Won’t Teach You About Creativity. Retrieved December 28, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-moraco/what-school-wont-teach-you-about-creativity_b_6639556.html)

The client-side app would give me the option of assigning any number of categories to the citation, just like good blog software. That way I could later retrieve the citation not only by title and/or publication but also by the categories I assign.

So if anyone out there knows of such an app please let me know. I searched under aggregator and didn’t find what I wanted, but maybe there is a better search term.

BTW, I generated the above APA format citation using citationmachine.net, a site that allows you to choose MLA and Chicago formats as well as APA. I found it to be a great tool, but it still needed some human intelligence. I had to find and add the date of publication, even though it was clearly presented in the heading of the online article. Also, it provided no field to enter the dates of updates, but maybe that is not something required in APA format. Anyhow, it would have been a great boon when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation!

One thought on “Aggregating Steve”

I use it like a collector of everything I read or want to read later on the internet. It’s $11 per year. It lets you tag and organize and search by any term you’d like later on. Very helpful.

I have it set up to collect (and make searchable) EVERYTHING I like on tumblr or twitter as well. It keeps copies of everything I tweet or post as well. I use Pinboard as opposed to Instapaper or Pocket (google these if you’re not familiar) because it has more plugins and extensions, and it’s faster. There are iphone, safari, firefox, and chrome plugins/apps so I can use the service and bookmark/archive/make reference of things no matter where I am or what I’m doing. It’s perfect.

You might also like Evernote, which I use as more of an idea-keeping and draft-saving service. Evernote is for stuff I create or notes I take, pinboard is for stuff other people make I’d like to keep track of.